MOST serial killers, it is said, developed a taste for inflicting pain and fear on their victims by practising on family pets or other animals. Moreover, evidence that a person who is cruel to animals may also be capable of abusing his or her spouse or children has been accumulating for many years.
So, should an incident involving animal cruelty be treated as a signal for child protection agencies to step in to prevent another horror story like that of the infamous Baby P murder?
No, says Fiona McEwan, a postdoctorate fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London. Her research suggests that cruelty to animals is not necessarily a reliable predictor for other forms of abuse.
It is dangerous to extrapolate the findings of studies on an unrepresentative sample like sadistic murderers to assess behaviour in the general population. This can result in the “consequential fallacy that if high-profile serial killers harmed animals as children, then all children who harm animals will become serial killers,” she says.
Yet, organisations like the RSPCA, the American Humane Society and PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) are convinced that there is a link between the different forms of abuse.
Unique approach
So who is Dr McEwan to dismiss a theory that also makes such intuitive sense? At first glance, she is no different to the other bright, keen young women passing through the foyer of one of the country’s leading centres for research into psychiatric disorders. But in one respect she may be unique, as probably the only scientist in Britain with a primary interest in the human brain, whose qualifications include membership of the RCVS.
Dr McEwan had already developed an interest in the differences between animal and human brains before starting her undergraduate studies and emerged from the Edinburgh veterinary school in 2001 with an intercalated degree in neuroscience.
After a couple of years in practice she enrolled at the Institute of Psychiatry on a four-year combined masters/PhD programme. Her postdoctorate research is mainly focused on the development of imitative behaviour in infants and children, once considered to be one of the key differences between patients with autism and those with normal social and cognitive function.
But she has maintained an active involvement in veterinary issues, both through locum shifts at two small animal practices in North London and by exploring those areas where researchers with interests in pathopsychology and animal welfare may find common ground.
She was asked to write an evaluation of “The Link” for Spiked Online, a website magazine specialising in iconoclastic reviews of current political and social topics. In this, she concluded that in using animal cruelty as a marker for wider problems, “policy arguments and decisions were beginning to run ahead of the underlying science”.
So Dr McEwan applied for a threemonth research fellowship with the prestigious Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology which provides impartial briefings on technical issues for members of both houses at Westminster. This resulted in a report entitled, Pets, families and inter-agency working, published in January of this year (www.parliament.uk/documents/up… /postpn350.pdf).
This reviewed the growing body of research on these issues and offered opinions on whether animal welfare organisations should be included in the process for dealing with families considered at risk. It also considered whether veterinary practitioners should be mandated to report cases of suspected animal abuse in households where children are present.
Complex evidence
Disappointingly, for those of us who hope for clarity and simplicity on such topics, the evidence she gathered was complex and did not yield easy answers for policy makers. Sure, there is an association between animal and child cruelty but it is not sufficiently robust to help pick out those children who may have been abused or identify those who may develop into abusers of other people.
One of the key problems is that animal abuse is disturbingly widespread. One study in Scotland revealed that 13% of adolescent boys admitted to having deliberately harmed an animal. There are quite a lot of kids out there who will do some fairly unpleasant things to an animal but will grow out of it and develop into perfectly normal adults,” Dr McEwan explains.
Then there are the limitations in the methodology for such research, which rely on self-reporting of any incidents. There may be considerable differences in the willingness of different groups to recognise cruelty or to admit to having inflicted it.
Certainly, the lack of a clear definition of what constitutes animal cruelty causes real problems in comparing the results of different studies, let alone in using that information to inform any future policy decisions.
It would be unwise and unnecessary to subject a family to the full force of an inter-agency investigation on the basis of behaviour which might be classed as low-grade abuse, such as teasing an animal, or where the suffering is due to neglect rather than malice.
More reliable
Dr McEwan does, however, highlight situations where the risk that animal abuse might be a more reliable indicator for interpersonal violence.
“The sort of things we should be looking at are cases where there is evidence of repeated cruelty, where the animals concerned are ‘socially valuable’ species like dogs and cats rather than wildlife, and where the violence uses the sort of methods we might call ‘up close and personal’ – so, for example, strangulation rather than shooting with an air rifle.”
Another important indicator is a lack of remorse. In many cases children who are responsible for this more serious abuse will already be known to the relevant authorities, as it often forms part of a spectrum of problems including violence towards family and friends.
So, overall, Dr McEwan has doubts about the value of introducing formal procedures to ensure cross-reporting between agencies. In many situations, it may be better to establish more informal networks – such as veterinary surgeons knowing who to contact in the social services department for advice when there is a suspected problem.
Meanwhile, rather than sending in investigation teams to deal with those welfare issues that may be minor and self-limiting, Dr McEwan proposes a low-key approach to preventing further problems.
In areas where there appears to be a high incidence of deliberate harm to wildlife, it may be more effective for RSPCA staff to visit schools to deliver talks on the humane treatment of animals, she suggests.
One area where co-operation between social services, animal welfare groups and others will certainly prove useful is in helping women to escape from an abusive relationship.
Shelters for abused women and their children are rarely able to take pets, and violence or threats towards a pet are often used by the abuser to exert control over the rest of their family. Those organisations which provide fostering services for the family pets are important in helping the victims break away and eventually form a new life, where they can be reunited with their animals, she notes.
In her own research, Dr McEwan hopes to provide some of the data which will help in providing a scientific basis for future decision making. One of the weaknesses of most previous studies is that they have been based on an unrepresentative sample of the population – those people who have shown already developed abnormal behaviour resulting in a referral to a psychiatrist. So she is looking for early signs of problems in a normal population of more than 1,000 families that include both identical and nonidentical twins.
In a project that has been partfunded by the RSPCA, she has been interviewing family members to investigate whether there are any consistent factors leading to the emergence of animal cruelty in children aged between five and seven years old.
Her study forms part of a long-term programme at the institute supported by the Medical Research Council, which is examining all forms of disruptive behaviour in schoolchildren and looking at the influence of various environmental and social pressures such as poverty.
